ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A disgruntled, former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist promised to build 40 nuclear weapons for Venezuela in 10 years and design a bomb targeted for New York City in exchange for "money and power," according to secret FBI recordings released Wednesday. In the recordings, Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni tells an agent posing as a Venezuelan official that the bombs would prevent the United States from invading the oil-rich nation and brags to his wife that the passing of secrets would make him wealthy. "I'm going to be the boss with money and power," the naturalized U.S. citizen...

Chronic lapses in safety procedures at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico may have led to a radiation leak that has forced a prolonged shutdown across the state of the only permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository, federal inspectors said on Wednesday. The inspectors, in a sharply critical report, sought to explain how a barrel of plutonium-tainted debris from the nuclear weapons lab near Santa Fe ended up improperly packaged before it was shipped off for burial 300 miles away at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The leak of radiation, a small amount of which escaped to the surface...

A 55-gallon drum of nuclear waste, buried in a salt shaft 2,150 feet under the New Mexico desert, violently erupted late on Feb. 14 and spewed mounds of radioactive white foam. The flowing mass, looking like whipped cream but laced with plutonium, went airborne, traveled up a ventilation duct to the surface and delivered low-level radiation doses to 21 workers. The accident contaminated the nation's only dump for nuclear weapons waste — previously a focus of pride for the Energy Department — and gave the nation's elite ranks of nuclear chemists a mystery they still cannot unravel. Six months after...

Los Alamos National Laboratory packed 57 barrels of nuclear waste with a type of kitty litter believed to have caused a radiation leak at the federal government's troubled nuclear waste dump, posing a potentially "imminent" and "substantial" threat to public health and the environment, New Mexico officials said Monday. State Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn issued a formal order giving the lab two days to submit a plan for securing the waste containers, many of which are likely stored outdoors on the lab's northern New Mexico campus or at temporary site in west Texas.

Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs...

A Los Alamos Story Worthy of Stephen King Ever heard of The Demon Core? It was named by Los Alamos scientists — who are generally not a superstitious lot — after it claimed multiple lives, in a series of strange and horrible accidents. Discover a legend of science... that's worthy of a horror movie. When I was reading Stephen King stories, I was constantly amazed at the things he made scary. It was like reading the legend of the monkey's paw over and over again, with increasingly weird objects. His most famous evil objects are the hotel in The Shining...

Some 400 to 800 workers will be leaving Los Alamos National Laboratory this spring — preferably by choice, the lab announced Tuesday. Lab Director Charlie McMillan told workers the staff reduction plan has been sent to the National Nuclear Security Administration for approval, calling it a “voluntary separation program.” This chunk will be taken from the 7,585 permanent employees at LANL, explained spokesman Fred deSousa. It will not affect students, post-doctoral, term or union workers, he said, noting that those groups bring LANL’s current employment to 11,127 people. “We are taking these actions now in an attempt to reduce the...

Nearly 12 per cent of households in Los Alamos have assets worth $1m or more. The northern New Mexico town of Los Alamos has been revealed as having the highest concentration of millionaires in America. The town, which is home to a government nuclear weapons lab, topped a report after it was found that more than one in ten households is home to a millionaire. Report findings state there are 885 millionaire households among the population of Los Alamos of around 18,000. ... Los Alamos saw off competition from Naples, Florida, which was second, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was third...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Anti-nuclear activists say they will fight a proposal to create national parks at Los Alamos National Laboratory and two other sites where the world's first nuclear bombs were developed. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar released a study to Congress last week that recommends establishing a national historical park to commemorate the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.

The wildfire that surrounds the nuclear lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, has grown to at least 61,000 acres amid mounting concerns about what might be in the smoke that's visible from space. Such fear has prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to bring in air monitors, along with a special airplane that checks for radiation levels. So far officials have not been able to find anything. "Our facilities and nuclear material are protected and safe," Laboratory Director Dr. Charles McMillan told ABC News. ...

Authorities have ordered an evacuation of Los Alamos due the threat from Las Conchas wildfire. Below is a press release from Los Alamos County that was issued moments ago: Los Alamos County officials are reporting the fire is now threatening Los Alamos. They are ordering a mandatory evacuation which will begin and proceed in this order: Group 1: Western, Quemazon, Ponderosa; Group 2: North Community, Barranca Mesa, North Mesa; Group 3: East of Diamond and the remainder of the town site. White Rock is NOT being evacuated at this time. Residents in Los Alamos should NOT go to White Rock...

SANTA FE, New Mexico (Reuters) - Voluntary evacuations have been issued for Los Alamos, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is threatened by a fast-moving wildfire that broke out in northern New Mexico on Sunday, authorities said. The Las Conchas Fire flared early Sunday afternoon around 12 miles southwest of Los Alamos, charring about 3,500 acres and endangering the nation's nuclear weapons laboratory and its surrounding communities, said Lawrence Lujan, a spokesman for the Santa Fe National Forest. "We have homes and we have the labs, so it's a very, very big concern, not only locally but nationally and...

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have developed a way to avoid the use of expensive platinum in hydrogen fuel cells, the environmentally friendly devices that might replace current power sources in everything from personal data devices to automobiles.

A scientist and his wife who used to work at a high-level U.S. energy laboratory were arrested Friday after an FBI sting operation and indicted on charges of conspiring to help develop a nuclear weapon for Venezuela. After their arrest, the two appeared in federal court in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They dealt with an FBI undercover agent posing as a Venezuelan agent. The government did not allege that Venezuela or anyone working for it sought U.S. secrets.

Nobel Prize-winning and eccentric physicist Richard Feynman has been called a buffoon and a magician, but is lauded as a man who could make science accessible and interesting for all. When I was a child I desperately wanted to be a scientist, but then it all went wrong. Unfortunately, during the early years of my secondary school education, science became joyless. It was a subject that seemed disjointed from the world even though it is the method that attempts to explain the world and the universe. If only it were possible to place an automaton Richard Feynman in every school....

New supercomputer studies suggest it is "very likely" ocean currents will carry oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico around the tip of Florida and thousands of miles up the U.S. East Coast this summer, researchers announced Thursday. "It is truly a simulation, not a prediction," said Terry Wallace, principal associate director for science, technology and engineering at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which collaborated on the project. "But it shows that when you inject something into the Gulf, it is likely to have much larger consequences." So far the oil has been...

'Loading-unloading' effect of grain boundaries key to repair of irradiated metalSelf-repairing materials within nuclear reactors may one day become a reality as a result of research by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists. In a paper appearing today in the journal Science, Los Alamos researchers report a surprising mechanism that allows nanocrystalline materials to heal themselves after suffering radiation-induced damage. Nanocrystalline materials are those created from nanosized particles, in this case copper particles. A single nanosized particle—called a grain—is the size of a virus or even smaller. Nanocrystalline materials consist of a mixture of grains and the interface between those grains,...

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico accidentally blew up a building on December 16 with a Civil War-style cannon. According to an occurrence report [pdf], which was first reported by the Project on Government Oversight, the lab's Shock and Detonation Physics team was testing a large-bore powder gun when they heard a "loud unusual noise." About 20 minutes later, the researchers ventured out of their bunker to see what had happened. Upon further investigation of the facility’s Technical Area 15, the team discovered that Building 562 had been blown apart. Two doors were "propelled off the structure"...

Eighty computers have been lost, stolen or gone "missing" at a major US nuclear weapons lab... worrisome losses at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the state of New Mexico. The letter says that 13 lab computers were lost or stolen during the past year, three of the machines taken from an employee's home in January. Another 67 computers are deemed "missing." What became of the missing computers and the "security ramifications of each of the 80 systems" was to be detailed in a written report to lab officials by February 6, according to the letter. AFP telephone calls to the...

WASHINGTON – The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico is missing 69 computers, including at least a dozen that were stolen last year, a lab spokesman said. No classified information has been lost, spokesman Kevin Roark said. The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight on Wednesday released a memo dated Feb. 3 from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration that said 67 computers were missing, including 13 that were lost or stolen in past 12 months.

Plague has been confirmed in a cat in Los Alamos, and the state Department of Health is urging New Mexicans to keep pets from hunting and take other precautions against the disease. An Eddy County man who caught plague in January from hunting rabbits is New Mexico's sole case of human plague this year. Last year, New Mexico recorded five human cases, one of them fatal. Plague is a bacterial disease of rodents generally transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas, but can be transmitted by direct contact with infected animals. It was found earlier this year in...

It's unlikely that Gov. Bill Richardson will be reminding voters in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination of this part of his fabled resume. Former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee pleaded guilty on Sept. 13, 2000 to a single count of mishandling nuclear secrets, ending an ordeal in which the Taiwanese-American scientist had spent 278 days in solitary confinement after being arrested in December 1999 for allegedly violating the Atomic Energy Act and stealing nuclear secrets. Seven years ago today, federal prosecutors dropped 58 counts of illegally downloading classified data from Los Alamos National Laboratory computers, and Lee...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A stockpile of plutonium and other nuclear weapons materials stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory hasn't been fully accounted for in 13 years or more, a government audit has found. The northern New Mexico lab's workers have done regular, partial inventories of the material, which the government considers to be at high risk of theft, the audit by the Energy Department's inspector general, Gregory Friedman, found. Yet an inventory of all the material hasn't been done in "perhaps 13 years or more," Friedman wrote. It wasn't even done when the lab's management contract changed last year, investigators...

WASHINGTON, July 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has started an enforcement action against Los Alamos National Laboratory. The department and its National Nuclear Security Administration announced Friday they had started a "formal enforcement actions ... against the University of California and the Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the prior and current management and operating contractors of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico." The action was being taken "for violations of classified information security requirements under their respective contracts," the NNSA said in a statement. "Investigations revealed that management deficiencies of both contractors were a central...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 3 -- The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has resumed production of plutonium detonators, the first production since 1989. The first detonator, known as a "pit," was completed last month and shipped to Texas, but on Monday, the laboratory hosted a ceremonial stamping of approval of a second pit for dignitaries, including U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., The Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal reported. The devices are designed for W88 warheads used on nuclear submarines and the lab intends to produce 10 of them a year to replace older ones in rotation, lab Director Michael Anastasio...

What's going on at Los Alamos? The nation's premier nuclear-weapons laboratory appears plagued with continuing security problems. Barely 10 days after revelations of a leak of highly classified material over the Internet, NEWSWEEK has learned of two other security breaches. In late May, a Los Alamos staffer took his lab laptop with him on vacation to Ireland. A senior nuclear official familiar with the inner workings of Los Alamos—who would not be named talking about internal matters—says the laptop's hard drive contained "government documents of a sensitive nature." The laptop was also fitted with an encryption card advanced enough that...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - A Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist, after more than two decades of work, has figured out how to liquefy natural gas using sound waves _ which could open up more gas fields. "This is a low-cost, low-maintenance technology that can access fields that as of today have a zero value," said John Gorman, a 30-year veteran of the energy industry who runs Houston-based Swift LNG, which has licensed the lab's technology. Gorman and lab physicist Greg Swift _ who has no stake in the company of the same name _ expect the liquefaction technology will...

Congressional leaders aren't finished scrutinizing Los Alamos National Laboratory over its security failures. Members of a powerful House committee have asked Congress' investigative arm, the General Accountability Office, to evaluate the feasibility of moving classified activities to other laboratories "where there is a better track record with respect to security." In a Feb. 16 letter to Comptroller General David Walker, House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders said repeated security problems have cast doubt on whether lab manager Los Alamos National Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration "are capable of assuring adequate safety, security, and sound business management practices." The...

The past four years had been remarkable, a climb to prominence a congressman from New Mexico could only have dreamed of. Bill Richardson's good fortune began in late 1996 with an early-morning phone call from President Clinton, who tapped him to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. It was a position he used to launch himself onto the international stage as a peacemaker, deal-broker and regular on the Sunday morning political week-in-review shows. Less than two years later, he had been promoted from Cabinet-light to a full member of the Clinton team, heading the 110,000-employee Department of Energy. It...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Fed-up lawmakers on a House oversight committee said Tuesday they want to strip a federal nuclear agency of its security responsibilities and threatened to shut down Los Alamos National Laboratory to correct a decade of security lapses there. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said he has sat through nearly a decade of hearings in which the Energy Department and the northern New Mexico nuclear weapons lab have promised to fix security problems. "I've been hearing these promises for a long time, and they've become somewhat tedious," he said. Lawmakers blistered the lab for its most recent security breach...

On Thursday, the Department of Energy canned the guy in charge of the country's nuclear weapons program. On Thursday, Los Alamos National Laboratory told staffers to get ready for random drug tests. On Thursday, Democrats took control of Congress. Looks like Department of Energy and LANL officials are running for political cover after another year of throwing millions of taxpayer dollars at security improvements to see if they stick. "Why" doesn't matter as much as "what took so long?" The latest DOE/LANL embarrassments involve a DOE computer security breach in Albuquerque (the theft of more than a thousand employee Social...

Study says bees can find explosives By DEBORAH BAKER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 27 minutes ago SANTA FE, N.M. - Here's the latest buzz on detecting explosives: bomb-sniffing bees. A study at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found that honeybees can be trained to detect explosives, even in tiny quantities. "These bees really perform," said bee biologist Timothy Haarmann, the study's leader. Whether honeybees will ever be enlisted in the war on terror looks doubtful at this point. In thousands of trials conducted over the past 18 months at the nuclear weapons lab, bees stuck out their tongues when...

Researchers in the US have used an artificially-structured "metamaterial" to build a device that can control highly-elusive terahertz (THz) radiation. The modulator is claimed to be ten-times better at switching a THz beam than previous designs and could pave the way for the use of the radiation in a wide range of applications in chemistry, astronomy and even airport security (Nature 444 597). Sandwiched between the microwave and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum (at about 300 GHz to 10 THz), THz radiation is notoriously difficult to work with. It is too high frequency to be manipulated electrically like microwaves...

An American engineer standing trial for spying and revealing secrets to China has been indicted for passing secrets to Israel. The indictment against Noshir Gowadia, 62, a U.S. citizen of Indian origin, provides no details to the nature of secrets passed to Israel or to whom they were given. If convicted, Gowadia could face the death penalty. Advertisement The secrets revealed to China are the primary allegations in the indictment, and those revealed to Israel secondary. Gowadia is also alleged to have delivered U.S. secrets to Germany and Switzerland. The indictment indicated that Gowadia's motivations were financial only. Gowadia is...

Data Found In Drug Raid Contains Weapons-Design Secrets. The recent security breach at Los Alamos National Laboratory was very serious, with sensitive materials being taken out of the facility — possibly including information on how to deactivate locks on nuclear weapons, officials tell CBS News. Officials say there is no evidence the information taken from Los Alamos was sold or transferred to anybody else, but there is no way to be sure right now. As CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson was the first to report, secret documents apparently taken from the lab were found during a drug raid at a...

Group: Lab breach bigger than thought By Deborah Baker, Associated Press Writer 11/2/06 SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - A former nuclear weapons lab contract worker took home not only classified information on a portable computer storage drive, but also about 200 pages of printed documents, her lawyer said Thursday. The confirmation of the papers follows a watchdog group's report that an internal memo from the Los Alamos National Laboratory indicates the amount of classified information found at the woman's home is substantially larger than first thought. Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an activist organization, reported that the memo appeared to be...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - A self-described methamphetamine addict said he doesn't know anything about the classified Los Alamos National Laboratory data that authorities found in the mobile home where he was staying. "I was basically at the wrong place at the wrong time," Justin Stone, 20, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from jail.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the nation's key nuclear weapons research centers, confirmed Wednesday that it experienced a potentially major security breach — discovered last week when police found three laboratory computer drives during a drug arrest at a New Mexico trailer park. Police reports released Wednesday identified the owner of the trailer, where officers found a sizable amount of drug paraphernalia associated with methamphetamine use, as Jessica Quintana. Law enforcement officials said Quintana was a former contract employee at the lab. The FBI executed a second search of the trailer in Los Alamos on Friday but sealed the...

A DRUGS BUST at a trailer park in New Mexico has turned up what appear to be classified documents from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, the latest in a series of embarrassing security leaks from the home of the atom bomb.Los Alamos police arrived at the trailer park after receiving a domestic violence call and discovered drug paraphernalia that suggested the home was being used as a factory for the production of methamphetamine, or crystal meth. While searching the records of the occupant for evidence of a drug-dealing business, officers stumbled across the documents stored on a computer file....

A search of a suspected meth lab turned up classified documents from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where, among other things, nuclear weapons research is conducted. According to the Associated Press, a researcher at the lab was under investigation for methamphetamine related offences, and the documents were discovered when police executed an arrest warrant against her. Police contacted the FBI, which has said only that the documents in question "appear to contain classified material," the AP reports. Los Alamos has developed a reputation for shoddy security, with a series of high-profile blunders over the past few years. These range from the...

A drug bust at a trailer park in New Mexico turned up what appeared to be classified documents taken from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, authorities said Tuesday. Local police found the documents while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home, said Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos, N.M., Municipal Police Department. The documents were discovered during a search of the man's records for evidence of his drug business, Ney said. Police alerted the FBI to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the drug dealer,...

(CBS) Another apparent breach of classified material is under federal investigation at the nation's premier nuclear weapons laboratory: Los Alamos National Laboratory, sources tell CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. The breach apparently was discovered when Los Alamos police recently conducted a methamphetamine raid on an area home. Inside the house, along with drug paraphernalia, police allegedly found classified materials apparently from the grounds of the Los Alamos Laboratory. How somebody involved in illegal drugs would also have access to classified materials from the nation's nuclear weapons facility is unknown but under investigation. The home is believed to belong to a...

WASHINGTON - A drug raid on a Los Alamos scientist's home in New Mexico turned up what appeared to be classified documents taken from the nuclear weapons lab, the FBI said Tuesday. Police discovered the documents at the scientist's home while making an arrest in a methamphetamine investigation, according to an FBI official in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. The police alerted the FBI to the documents, prompting a federal search of the unidentified female scientist's home. The official would not describe the documents except to say that they appeared...

ST. LOUIS - Jim West figures he and his fellow residents of Los Alamos, N.M., are too busy biking, fishing and riding horses to spend much money. Perhaps that's part of the reason the town of 18,500 residents ranks No. 1 in this year's A.G. Edwards "Nest Egg Index," an annual ranking of how the nation's cities and states put away money for safekeeping. Los Alamos topped the list with a rating of 134.31 indexed to a national average of 100. Connecticut's Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk was second at 126.20, followed by last year's winner, San Jose, Calif., with a 125.93 rating. It...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- IBM will build a next-generation supercomputer for the U.S. Energy Department with the potential to achieve a sustained speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, the department said on Wednesday. The new computer, dubbed "Roadrunner", will be built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Congress provided $35 million in fiscal 2006, which ends on September 30, to launch the computer project. Roadrunner may eventually be used for an Energy Department program that ensures the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable without the resumption of underground testing, the department...

WASHINGTON— Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources. Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China. The Associated Press and four other news organizations have...

WASHINGTON -- Wen Ho Lee, the former nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources. Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China. The Associated Press and four other news organizations have agreed...

When the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory resigned last year, the University of California, which runs the lab, agreed to keep him on the payroll in a new job for up to 28 months so he would qualify for the university's retirement plan, according to a copy of the director's separation agreement obtained by The Chronicle. The university is paying the annual $235,000 salary of G. Peter Nanos -- at a likely total cost of about $548,333. He is now at a job with the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Virginia, which is trying to develop...

In February last year, the chairman of the Senate energy committee sat down at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a private briefing on climate change. Was global warming real, Sen. Pete Domenici wanted to know. He turned for answers to a federal lab that he had gazed on admiringly since he was a boy. In a barrage of computer slides, Los Alamos scientists showed the 72-year-old Republican senator a planet tipping into uncertainty. Greenhouse gases were increasing in the atmosphere and the trapped solar radiation was boosting temperatures worldwide, with cascading impacts on natural and human welfare. Natural causes alone...